Alisa Valdes has spent much of her recent career writing women’s fiction and teen fiction, including her best-selling debut novel in 2003, The Dirty Girls Social Club. In her just-released memoir, Valdes takes on a much more personal subject — her own dating life, and the real-life drama that followed has shocked many readers.

In the memoir, The Feminist and the Cowboy: An Unlikely Love Story (Gotham, $26), Valdes writes about her unexpected romance with a tall, handsome and very conservative ranch owner and how their relationship changed her views on love, submission and gender roles. Initially, it was hailed by some as a rebuke of modern, egalitarian relationships and a celebration of femininity and traditional values.

But just as the book was arriving to store shelves this month, blogs started buzzing after Valdes revealed that the man — referred to in the book only as the Cowboy — became abusive and that the relationship ended as the book was in production. She says she is planning to write an e-book or some kind of sequel to serve as an afterword to the memoir.

Valdes, a former journalist for the Boston Globe and Los Angeles Times who will be appearing in Denton on Tuesday, spoke about her book by phone from her home in Albuquerque. (The interview has been edited for length and clarity.)

Earlier this month, you revealed that the Cowboy verbally abused you and made violent threats. Why did you decide to share that?

It was fascinating to me that a lot of reviewers were reading the memoir and coming away with the impression that he was an abuser — because at the time that I wrote [the book], I didn’t see it.

I felt a responsibility to be honest that they were actually seeing something that was true. I wanted, in a strange way, to start a dialogue, an honest dialogue, about the nature of abuse.

The book I had written — to be a love letter, almost, or a way of explaining how letting go of my need to control relationships resulted in me being happier — was true for a time. But he kept demanding more and more control, and that became abusive. It got very bad.

I think, like many people, I’d misunderstood what abusive relationships can look like. I had that stereotype that we get from movies of the battered woman as being someone who was meek or weak or easy to push around. I wasn’t that kind of person, and it still happened to me. And it happened so subtly. I compared it to being the frog that’s put into a pot of cold water over a low flame and boiled to death. You don’t even notice it happening until it’s too late.

What the book actually ends up being to me now is one of the most accurate snapshots that you can find of the honeymoon phase of a toxic relationship.

Looking back, do you now see the red flags? Do you cringe when you read the book?

Absolutely, yes — like the part where I find out that the Cowboy is seeing another woman. Now, in retrospect, I look at that and think, what I should have done is driven home, put his number on block and never spoken to him again. That’s the intelligent thing to do, but that’s not what I did.

Do you have any regrets about writing the book? Do you ever wonder why you opened yourself and your relationship to so much public scrutiny?

I don’t regret it, but I am really, really grateful for people who read it for what it is — as just my story and not me telling anybody how to live their life.

When I turned it in, I had a very different vision of the future and how things would be when the book came out. I thought I’d be engaged or married to this man. I thought he would be by my side on the book tour. I thought we’d be living proof that what I was saying was true. But it wasn’t, and it didn’t happen that way, so I have to adjust and admit to having made mistakes and having been wrong and to suffer whatever consequences it brings.

In the book, you make the case that feminism stole your womanhood. What are your thoughts about feminism and submission now after all of the experiences you’ve gone through?

I want to be clear that I don’t think the concept of feminism in general — as meaning men and women are of equal worth — is a bad thing. I consider myself a feminist. What I feel like robbed me of a certain part of my womanhood is that radical second-wave feminism I was raised in and wholeheartedly embraced.

I was raised by very extreme Marxists, hippie-academic parents who taught us that every difference between men and women was a product of socialization and that I, as a girl, could do anything a boy could do.

I’m blessed to have been raised in that kind of environment in many ways. It made me outspoken. It made me strong. It made me have a career where I could put my own personal story in the book and not be afraid. But at the same time, they demonized anything that was traditionally feminine. So I couldn’t wear makeup. I couldn’t have Barbies. I couldn’t join Girl Scouts. All those normal things that other girls were doing were openly mocked in my home.

With the Cowboy, I loved this very alpha male. The visceral, ancient and biological reaction that I had to him was confusing and hypocritical and didn’t match the ideology that I had held so strongly for so much of my life. So the book is really me wrestling with all of that.

I grew a lot. I gained a lot. I mellowed a lot. I do think there are differences that are not socialized. For me, it was a radical, new idea.

Do you think people can have a successful romantic relationship despite political differences or different views on gender roles?

I think it is possible, and we were able to do that. It really requires both people be mature and respectful all the time. I don’t think it’s the easiest way.

It’s a very complex world with a lot of very well-informed, well-educated, intelligent people in it who just have a different point of view. So I loved that I was able to get out of my old prejudices, and I will never go back to them. I have a lot of conservative friends now where I didn’t before. … I would love to see all of us be able to listen to each other a little bit more and judge each other a little bit less.

Plan your life: Alisa Valdes will speak at 3:30 p.m. Tuesday in the Business Leadership Building, Room BLB 170, 1307 W. Highland St., at the University of North Texas in Denton. Details at journalism.unt.edu/alisa-valdes.

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